X-TREME WRITING!

So a while ago I read the novel "Empire" by Orson Scott Card. I'm a fan of his fiction, less so of his political writing -- frankly, I think he's off his rocker most of the time, and obnoxiously dismissive of anyone who disagrees with him, although he will occasionally startle me with a well-reasoned and fairly-argued point about a controversial issue. So I was looking forward to this one, not least because its premise -- a civil war breaking out in the contemporary United States -- is an interesting one to me.

It's appallingly bad.

Leaving its politics aside, its literary qualities are pure camp, played with an absolutely unironic intensity. Its heroes are all unflinching, steely-eyed, square-jawed military men; its villains cringing, conniving academics plotting the overthrow of the free world. The prose is riddled with intrusive editorials from his blog. It's almost impossible to believe that this emerged from the same mind that created the tales of Alvin Maker -- stories about a group of men and women trying to stop a civil war that are thoughtful, layered, and inventive. Seriously. This reads like one of Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen novels, only it's not a parody.

I suspect that all of these issues are symptomatic of an underlying conceptual problem. The basic argument of the book is as follows: that all of the moderates need to get together and stop arguing, or the extremist wackos will break us apart. On its face, this seems like a reasonable position, and echoes one that I've been hearing in political discourse for a while. The problem is that it's bullshit. Read his work closely, and his definitions become a bit less opaque. Do you support homosexual marriage? Then you're a wacko! Do you oppose the occupation of Iraq? Then you're a wacko! And pretty soon, it becomes clear that the real argument of the book reads thus: that all of the moderates (people who think what I do) need to get together and stop arguing, or the extremist wackos (everyone who disagrees with me) will break us apart.

It's a rhetorical trick -- six of one, half a dozen of the other. For that matter, I have a hard time seeing the virtue of moderation as a guiding moral principle, period. Sure, you can look around you and draw up an average of the opinions of everyone within your political boundaries -- and I guess that would make you a moderate, if such a thing is to be desired -- but in nearly every other place and time in human history, you'll be a raving extremist. You believe in representative government? Guess what? In the context of most other civilizations throughout time, you're a wacko. I know that it's an extreme example. but if you were a moderate in Nazi Germany, I wouldn't want to know you. What's to be gained by seeking a middle position between two morally untenable ones? The founding fathers weren't seeking a reasonable middle position, and they were quite openly contemptuous of those who did. This guy sure as hell wasn't a moderate about anything.

After I spoke at my Republican caucus, I was followed by a man who stood up and asserted that "an election is not the time to assume a moral position." Buh? Then when is the appropriate time? When there's nothing at stake? When there's nothing to be either gained or lost by espousing a principle?

I'm annoyed with myself, because I've been so hesitant to support Ron Paul. For a number of reasons. He seems too good to be true, for one thing, and I've been burned by politicians before -- the last time I was this enthusiastic about a politician was Bill Clinton in 1996. (Which, I suppose, demonstrates how far my politics have swung in the past decade.) For another, I'm embarrassed to be playing to type, to be so utterly predictable. A fellow playwright asked me who I was supporting a couple of weeks back, then cut me off before I could respond: "Oh, you're a libertarian. You're just going to be supporting Ron Paul."

So yeah, I'm annoyed with myself. Not because I haven't been shoving my opinions down people's throats (like, I'm afraid, so many other Ron Paul supporters have been doing), but because I've been squatting over my enthusiasm for him, stammering and changing the subject even when people ask me point blank who I like in the race -- when I'm faced with the most exciting political candidate I've seen in my lifetime. In a way, that's why I'm pleased to see the success of Obama's candidacy, despite my profound dislike for his policies -- that someone has the opportunity to support a candidate that they can believe in. Lord knows the Republicans don't. When presented with the options, they chose the path of political expediency.

And if that's the voice of moderation, then I'll none of it. If there's a basic argument to what I'm trying to say, it reads thus: that all of the extremists need to keep arguing...

...before the self-styled moderates find a way to pull us together.

My Life as a Political Insider

As probably does not surprise anybody reading this, I'm a Ron Paul supporter. As may surprise some reading this, I am enough so that I actually sucked it up and attended my local Republican precinct caucus on Super Tuesday. That's right -- I shaved, buttoned up my shirt, and plunged into enemy territory. I haven't really been widely advertising this fact.

So my intention was to go in, lay low, cast my votes for sympathetic delegates, and slink back into irrelevance. But then the convention started, and people started talking, and I started getting irritated with everyone, and then *I* started talking, and I talked for a while, and then people started arguing, and then somebody raised his hand and nominated me as a delegate, and a bunch of people voted for me.

The three primary slots went to the McCain supporters, but I somehow got elected as one of the alternates; which is how I found myself at the Republican Convention for Senate District 44 in Hopkins tonight.

So, I'm a playwright. In Minneapolis. Which means that I find myself operating in a pretty lefty crowd, most of the time. And most of my energy goes towards arguing with that. So tonight, I was startled to be reminded of a fact that I'd pretty much forgotten: I really fucking can't stand Republicans.

I've spent the past five years performing in front of a variety of crowds, in a variety of different contexts, and if I've picked up one new ability in that time, it's a sensitivity to audience response. And the "playful" back-and-forth between the speakers and the crowd was riddled with so much understated racism, homophobia, and xenophobia, I still feel a little slimy thinking about it.

I walked out early, unbuttoning my shirt on the way. My brief, experimental return to the two-party system has fizzled out rather abruptly. For better or worse, I'm officially back in my role as a political outsider. Which, in retrospect, is probably the place I belong.

Maybe you can, but man, I hope you can't.

'Kay, I'm drunk enough now to poke my head out of my current pseudo-retirement from political blogging, but I've just sat through Obama's speech and I just have a few quick things I'd like to go on record as having said.

First of all, I've resigned myself to this election being one of three heartbreaks for me: first, Doug Stanhope's dropping out of the race several months ago; second, Ron Paul's brutal trouncing tonight; and third, whichever one of these aggressive interventionists ends up wielding the most powerful military force in human history in November.

Believe me, I'm well aware how absurd my position must seem to everyone else. It goes beyond rooting for the underdog. It's not rooting for the Giants: it's more like, say, rooting for the Twins during the Superbowl.

A while back, Bill posted Obama's speech The Great Need of the Hour in an enthusiastic display of support. I would, if I may, like to point at this speech as being symptomatic of exactly why I'm incapable of supporting him. In this speech, he is the author of a concept known as an "empathy deficit"; I am the author of the essay Empathy is the Enemy. I maintain my original position: as a guide for individual behavior, empathy is a powerful and beautiful force; as a guide for designing a monolithic Federal government, nightmarish.

Barack and his supporters talk enthusiastically of wide-eyed idealism, of overcoming the negative impact of cynicism in our politics. I am, unapologetically, a cynic, a skeptic -- to the point that I have placed the desire to question at the center of every play I've ever written, every vote I've ever cast, at the center of my entire existence. Seeing a roomful of people chanting "Yes we can" in unison is not an inspiring image to me -- rather, it's one of the most chilling that I can imagine. As I watch the candidates of both major parties preaching varying degrees of collectivism, I find myself wondering whether I would be one of the first to be "reformed" by their new regime.

Am I paranoid? Yeah, maybe. But I look at the remaining field of candidates, and for a non-interventionist, my heart can only sink. On the right, I see a community of people who want to wield American military might in the Middle East like a game of Whack-a-Mole, swinging wildly at everything they see, planting permanent bases in every country with an oil interest and spreading democracy at the point of a sword. On the left, I see a community of people embedding our country deeper and deeper still into ever more elaborate systems of entangling alliances. Who the hell am I supposed to vote for? How the hell am I not supposed to be a cynic?

And once again I'm a Catholic schoolboy, glancing about me in despair, marveling at the capacity for faith of everyone around me, at the ability to surrender completely to an ideology. But I can't, I just can't, no matter how appealing the idea is to me.

Because I'm a cynic.

What a Bunch of Poonises

My nephew has recently coined the word "poonis," under the logical (and etymological, and scatological) reasoning that if pee comes out your penis, then the anatomical region that produces poo must be your poonis. I've rapidly developed an intense fondness for this word, not least because it seems to me to neatly encapsulate my current feelings about the Democratic Party.

I often feel out of step with the rest of the LME crowd -- not so much because of the philosophical differences, but because I so rarely talk about current events, preferring to use this space as a place to think about the relationships of individuals to their societies in a much broader, less specific sense. I pay fairly close attention to day-to-day politics -- I'm something of a news junkie -- but I just don't feel that I have much to say about it.

Take the current debate over the surge, for example. What's the big story here? That the Democrats continue to be a pack of pussies, worn, torn, stretched, and bleeding from brutal overuse? That the Republicans continue to form a line of glistening, erect penises, eagerly thrusting in and out of whatever oily orifice they can find? It's hardly worth coming up with the crude analogy, although I did enjoy the triple pun in the word "crude."

Briefly spent some time in a resort village. I'm told that the landscape was beautiful, though this may have been obscured for me by the presence of four Starbucks in a single square mile. Partway through the trip, we discovered a sign that boasted the opportunity to "Make Your Own Ice Cream." We eagerly rushed forward, to discover their offer of ANY combination of chocolate or vanilla, with ANY combination of either a waffle cone or a cup. Buh? Those are significantly *less* options than just about any ice cream shop I've ever been to.

The rhetoric of self-determination requires only the illusion of choice. And -- in an age where we're coming to accept a more fluid perception of human sexuality -- I find it ironic that our ultimate choice boils down to a bunch of pussies, or a bunch of dicks.

Channeling Andy Rooney

In an airport again. On my way to Canada this time. Stopped to use a restroom -- three stalls, all lined up, all occupied. Used those motion-activated flushing mechanisms, which means that each time one of us shifted, the damn thing flushed again, which happened roughly every five seconds.

Aside from the horrific environmental waste, this is just stupid. Everything in the bathroom was automated, the sink, the soap, the toilets, the towels, and not one goddamn thing worked the way it was supposed to. An extraordinary amount of time, money, and effort went into making my bowel-moving experience both more wasteful and less convenient. And -- why? Because we've literally become too collectively lazy to wipe our own fucking asses?

I caught a few episodes of "American Inventor" a while back. I had some interest in the concept -- my father's a scientist, and most of our money growing up came from patents on his inventions -- but I was vaguely appalled by the steady stream of new bike seats, sunglasses, and perfume bottles. There wasn't a single new idea there, and these people had devoted years of their life and thousands of dollars to -- what? A better bar of soap?

If this (admittedly sensationalistic) piece of pop-culture is any indication, the new god of invention isn't progress but convenience. It's a sad irony that such an astounding amount of intelligence has gone towards developing new technologies that have pampered us into drooling incompetence. Living in such a decadent culture is almost enough to make me run off into the woords and become a survivalist.

But not quite. After all, what would I do if I needed to rent a Buffy DVD at 11:59pm?

Capitalism At Its Finest

...and, in a truly fell stroke of irony, shortly after my last blog post I received the following e-mail:

Locate Registered Sex Offenders Living In Your Neighborhood

New registered sex offenders may have recently moved into your neighborhood or your city. Let us help you locate them with a quick search so you can better protect your loved ones.

I click on the link, which offers me a "Free search for sex offenders in my area." Inputting my zip code reveals that -- gasp! -- there is 1 sexual offender located in my immediate area. And, for a small activation fee, they'll tell me who he is!

That's right -- if you don't give us money, strangers could rape your children. Yeesh.

Yeah, this one might be unpopular.

So I've been following the saga of Jack McClellan. The guy's a self-proclaimed -- and also non-practicing -- pedophile.

He's pretty much a grade-A creep. He claims to abbhor any kind of non-consensual relationship, then identifies his favored age-range as being between three and eleven years old. Now, on some basic, primal level of the reptile brain, I can grasp the appeal of a nubile teenager -- those are, after all, the years in which the body is transitioning to adulthood, and begins sending out all kinds of sexual signals. It's literally in our DNA. Not that I by any means condone someone who chooses to pursue a sixteen-year-old -- just saying that I recognize how it could happen. But, ugh. A three-year-old? What kind of consent could possibly take place?

There's some legal gray area here -- although he claims to have never touched a child, he's posted sites that are essentially "how-to" guides for meeting young girls, and he's been seen hanging around places like playgrounds. If I burst into a bar, wielding a gun and screaming profanities, I'm behaving in a threatening manner and should probably be stopped, regardless of whether or not I actually pump a bullet into someone. So legally articulating exactly where that line is is difficult.

That's a discussion worth having. But it's not a discussion that's taking place anywhere near the hysterical news coverage, in which every interview I've seen displays an undisguised disgust with a legal system that leaves a guy like this on the streets. And, y'know? I hate to be the one to say it, but the fact that this guy is on the streets is probably an indication that our legal system is *working*. If he hasn't committed a crime, then he isn't a criminal. Not that I'd allow this guy anywhere near, say, my niece -- but I don't see any way to bring down the hammer of the law without going in a direction that strikes me as fundamentally *worse*.

That's something like thought crime, something a lot like a pre-emptive strike -- the same kind of mentality that leads us to bomb nations under the mere suspicion that they have the means to harm us, the same kind of mentality that leads us to disarm law-abiding citizens. Jesus may have said "...if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out..." but this seems to me to be somewhat impractical as state policy.

We can't prosecute someone who hasn't committed a crime. That's the painful trade-off of living in a free society, the very thing that makes freedom so terrifying -- because it means sacrificing a degree of safety, a degree of security. The rule of law, and the presumption of innocence, both leave us occasionally exposed to criminals. But the alternative? The alternative is unthinkable.